Adobe discontinuing Flash for mobile

[liz]

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/withou ... vant/19247

We\'ve had a lot of people asking about Flash support. While we do support the vector end of things (so you\'ll still be able to see all those lovely 2d animated ads, hurrah hurrah), we don\'t currently do the acceleration required for Flash video. People watching YouTube can still view video on the Raspberry Pi using h.264, so this isn\'t a huge problem for them, although other Flash video won\'t be viewable on the device.

As of yesterday, Adobe have discontinued support for Flash on mobile devices, which suggests to us that Flash on other devices isn\'t long for this world either. It\'s terribly resource-hungry and it\'s not very well written: these were also reasons we steered clear of implementing it fully. (We were not at all convinced that Flash was going to have a long life when we were developing Raspberry Pi; seeing it replaced by HTML5 on so many websites and the expense of implementing it helped us in our decision not to spend the time and money on supporting it fully.)

I\'d love to hear your thoughts on Flash, in particular in relation to Raspberry Pi.

[Montekuri]

Flash get old:
[img]http://beto.euqueroserummacaco.com/blog ... _flash.jpg[/img]
Time to new technologies (HTML5...)

[Nexy]

I hope this helps push webdevs away from Flash, I doubt it will though.

What state is the Flash Player on Meego or Fedora or Arch in? Does it do audio streaming well enough? I ask specifically as I\'m a heavy Napster user and it is one of my main desires for one of the RasPi\'s I\'m hoping to purchase. I\'d also rather like to listen to the BBC iPlayer radio streams such as Radio 1\'s live stream.

[Nutmeat]

[quote]Quote from liz on November 10, 2011, 23:03
...I\'d love to hear your thoughts on Flash, in particular in relation to Raspberry Pi.[/quote]
Why, thanks for asking!
Adobe have been pioneers on several widely distributed and adopted technologies, (think ps, pdf, and flash) but they are a corporate entity at the core, and they are motivated by the same forces that drive all of those entities. When I heard the news this mornIng, my first thought was focused on my concern for a friend of mine that works at adobe, but my next thought was one of jubilation. The end of flash? Wow, that took a long time.

Removing the distraction of flash from this device was a great move to begin with (IMHO). You might as well have introduced MS Visual Basic as the core programming language if Flash was to remain a concern. You would have been making the Raspi an extension of corporate interest which would have doomed this device to, well, who knows? Corporate gifts to select post secondary institutions? What excellent PR for those guys. \"We\'ll give you these so you can teach your kids to become our servants. Bwah ha ha ha ha!)

Okay, I\'m being a bit biased, but I\'m not afraid to express my preference for an alternative that comes with some freedom.

What this leaves behind is a renewed push for html5, which is likely to be far more beneficial in the long term (which, with the pyres already being erected for flash, could very well end up being short term as well).

I have to ask, do you guys really have a crystal ball in the boardroom over there?

[riffraff]

None too soon, I say. I\'ll hold the stake to it\'s heart if someone will wield the mallet.

[kme]

First Sadam, then Gadaffi and now Flash.
The world is becoming a better place after all.

[electrodacus]

Not sure Flash will be replace so soon. I will love to see that happen as soon as possible but HTML5 is still not finalized and there are not many adopters at this moment.
I use Linux exclusively and Flash is a mess it always was, so I hope HTML5 will be better even if it dose not look this way at the moment.

[cnxsoft]

I thought flash was not available for ARMv6 as I could not install flashplugin-nonfree via apt-get in my emulator running Debian. So it\'s good news to learn Raspberry Pi will support part of flash.
As for HTML5, I\'ve seen some impressive demos. It\'s supported by all new browsers so flash is not really needed anymore.

[Chris]

[quote]Quote from kme on November 11, 2011, 01:53
First Sadam, then Gadaffi and now Flash.
The world is becoming a better place after all.[/quote]

Your forgot Obama, I mean Osama

[Ryanroll]

Well, i have to say that i\'m a huge fan of plugins like \"flashblock\" & co that allow you to disable animated flash on any webpage you visit.

Try to acess at some well known webstites with menus and ads everywhere with a netbook (1.6ghz atom + 2gb running W7) and you\'ll see how pain in the ass it is.

My netbook is cooler, quieter, and gained like 30min battery since i\'m using flashblock

Not only flash has become nearly useless (unless you like to watch ads) but i really hope there will be some plugin like flashblock available on Raspberry PI browsers : with 700mhz and 256mb, i think it\'s just uber useful.

[barnaby]

[quote]Quote from electrodacus on November 11, 2011, 03:07
Not sure Flash will be replace so soon.[/quote]

Sadl,y I\'m with you there. I think corporate sites will hand onto their flash for as long as possible (not that anyone actually looks at corporate sites )

[quote] use Linux exclusively and Flash is a mess it always was, so I hope HTML5 will be better even if it dose not look this way at the moment. [/quote]

What do you mean, html5 + assoc. technologies not looking better than flash? From both an aesthetic point of view and a decelopment point of view I\'d say they look far better — certainly good enough to start using them on the web now.

As a freelancer I would demand a very good reason from a client not to use HTML5. I do of course make sure I\'m only using the less well supported features for progressive enhancement.

Cheers,
Barnaby

[obarthelemy]

My question is not so much about Flash going away, but about HTML5 coming in: is the damn thing going to be well standardized ? \'coz Flash got in in the first place for innovative features *and* way too many compatibility issues between HTML4 dialects and variants.
I\'m all for no Flash... except if that means I have to use 3 browsers, one because I like the UI, and the other 2 because sometimes, the first one, or the second one don\'t work. I sometimes I even have to break out IE (which is #4 ^^)

[barnaby]

[quote]Quote from obarthelemy on November 11, 2011, 14:55
My question is not so much about Flash going away, but about HTML5 coming in: is the damn thing going to be well standardized?)[/quote]

It\'s just as standardised as previous versions — it\'s entirely up to the developers to make sure they adhere to the standards and good coding practise generally.

HTML5 does do away with the various different doctypes — strict, transitional, etc. It removes a load of the mess that was present. So far developers seem to be treating it fairly well.

Cheers,
Barnaby

[E]

Maybe they just realised that there are only two types of people in the world. Those that hate Flash ads so much they have an adblocker, and those that have yet to install an adblocker

As most video sites who have yet to move to html5 say something like \'support for iphone coming soon\' I can\'t personally see it being a big problem the Pi not having Flash video in the long term.

[Burngate]

[quote]Quote from riffraff on November 11, 2011, 01:29
None too soon, I say. I\'ll hold the stake to it\'s heart if someone will wield the mallet.
[/quote]
When I nod my head, you hit it

Quote from one of my teachers: \"As soon as I open my mouth some fool starts talking\"

[liz]

That rustling you hear is Steve Jobs cackling in glee.

[ukscone]

nah the rustling is me jumping in and kicking piles of leaves about.

[tufty]

About time, too. although I\'d prefer it if flash generally went the way of the <blink> tag. It\'s a buggy, badly-coded, heap of crap. And that\'s me being nice about it.

Postscript is great. PDF is not too shabby, although Adobe seem to be intent on bolting several unnecessary kitchen sinks onto it. Every time you use flash on a website, a little web accessibility pixie dies.

[obarthelemy]

I actually obeject to PDF as much as to Flash. 90% of the stuff that\'s in PDF format could just as well be in HTML, mobi, ePub... and that would let it be read in a much broader variety of screen sizes / devices / apps, with automatic or preset reflow, font size, colors... Ebooks in green on blak on my Galaxy Note are gorgeous. PDF in black on white burn my eyes *and* force me to squint at the same time.

[Blars]

[quote]Quote from E on November 11, 2011, 19:29
Maybe they just realised that there are only two types of people in the world. Those that hate Flash ads so much they have an adblocker, and those that have yet to install an adblocker [/quote]

There are people who never installed flash, like me. I don\'t even use one of the dfsg alternitives.

[jojopi]

[quote]Quote from tufty on November 12, 2011, 15:54
It\'s a buggy, badly-coded, heap of crap.[/quote]

It took so many years for a native 64bit flash player to be released that a colleague of mine joked that they must have lost the source code somewhere along the line.

I would say that only this year, 2011, has flash finally reached an acceptable level of crashiness on linux x86-64. I will actually miss it a little, as a posterboy for how bad proprietary software can be. But I do wish it had died long ago.

It is worth mentioning that the PostScript language, which I adore, was created by the actual founders of Adobe, whereas flash was obtained by the company\'s much later acquisition of macromedia.

[riffraff]

Truthfully, I\'ve scene some great Flash animations and little games that truly shine... but for the most part I\'ve seen coding travesties masquerading as web sites (surprisingly most of them for major corporations) where someone\'s TRIED (and failed) to create something unique. You know the kind, where you have to play pin the tail on the donkey to select product support, then wind up getting corporate history instead.

[carlosfm]

I hate Flash, but HTML5 is so full of bugs that... I hate it.
Now what?

BTW, worth reading from top to bottom:
http://www.phoboslab.org/log/2011/03/th ... tml5-audio

[carlosfm]

Just a side note, what does the FAQ page here has that makes it so \"heavy\"?
You need a modern/fast multicore PC to load it without crawling and getting the CPU to 100% for a long time.
It doesn\'t have Flash, I only see text and some avatars.
Please don\'t blame Flash for everything, because there\'s too much javascript out there, where you would only need text.

[tufty]

[quote]Quote from carlosfm on November 13, 2011, 01:08
Just a side note, what does the FAQ page here has that makes it so \"heavy\"?[/quote]
I just profiled it.

Within 5 seconds, the \"meat\" of the page was fully loaded. The rest of the 23 seconds it took to render was taken up making over 1000 individual requests to gravatar.com.